Christian Living on God's Nature

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Staying Quiet in a Noisy World

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1 Peter 5:8, Ephesians 6:12, Proverbs 4:23, Matthew 26:41, Psalm 46:10, 1 Kings 19:11-12, John 10:10

In the Critically acclaimed 2018 horror film A Quiet Place , Earth faces an alien invasion unlike any other. In the movie, the aliens behave like merciless monsters, using their lightning-fast sp...

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David Bosch

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Mission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It [is] thus put in the context of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine of the missio dei as Go...

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Author

Bruce Demarest

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Scripture

Romans 1:19, Acts 17:24, Acts 14:15, Acts 14:16, Acts 17:25, Acts 17:26-27, Romans 1:20, Acts 14:17, Romans 1:32, Acts 17:26, Romans 2:15, Romans 2:15-16

God exists (Ps. 19:1; Rom. 1:19). 2. God is uncreated (Acts 17:24). 3. God is Creator (Acts 14:15). 4. God is Sustainer (Acts 14:16; 17:25). 5. God is universal Lord (Acts 17:24). 6. God is self-suffi...

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A. W. Tozer

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Eternity won't be long enough to learn all that God is or praise Him for all that He has done.

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Timothy Keller

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To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule—it is a failure to treat God as God.

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Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder

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God’s very nature is to be in dialogue: [the Trinity] in an eternal movement or flow of openness and receiving, a total giving and accepting, spilling over into creation and calling creation back into...

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God made it. God loves it. God cares for it.

Author

Emily Hunter McGowin

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Scripture

Genesis 1:31, Psalm 104:24, Colossians 1:17, Isaiah 40:26, John 1:10, Romans 8:19, Hebrews 1:3

Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century mystic-theologian who maybe understood the belovedness of creation and new creation better than anyone. In the fifth chapter of her book Revelations of Divin...

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D. Douglas Meeks

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New Creation

The natural environment is our home, but it is first God’s creation. The cosmic scope of God’s new creation embraces the whole of nature. According to the biblical notion of shekinah, God intends to d...

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Our God is Great as God is Good

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Gardner C. Taylor

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Scripture

Romans 5:8, Psalm 90:2, James 1:17, Psalm 145:3, 1 John 4:8

The great African-American preacher Gardner Taylor, preacher of the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn for over 40 years, begins one of his sermons with a paean to the God revealed to us in the 66 boo...

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An Illustration of Faith as Grace, Not a Good Work

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Robert Farrar Capon

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2 Kings 5:1-14, Genesis 15:6, Matthew 13:44, Titus 3:5, John 6:29, Romans 5:1-2

In his book The Mystery of Christ , a series of fictionalized pastoral counseling sessions (based on actual events), the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon shares a number of helpful ways of unde...

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Maximize the Moment: Be Diligent

Author

Claude Alexander

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Scripture

John 9:1-5, John 9:5, John 9:null, John 9:25, Matthew 27:54

Blog post adapted from Necessary Christianity by Claude Alexander, Jr. Adapted from Chapter 5, "I Must Be Diligent" The life of Jesus reveals that God’s call and God’s claim on the belie...

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Author

Rudolf Borchardt

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God’s garden, made “in the beginning,” does not lie behind us, but ahead of us, in hope, and, in the meantime, all around us as our place of work. History without gardens would be a wasteland. What th...

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A Modern Worldview

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Annie Dillard

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Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy….We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism...It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that ...

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O God, whose reason rules the world,

Author

Boethius

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Scripture

Proverbs 8:22-31, 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, Exodus 19:16-20, Matthew 17:1-8, Job 38:41

O God, whose reason rules the world, who formed the starry heights above, timeless, time’s chain far forth you hurled, unmoved, gave all things power to move. Prevailed on by no outside cause to fashi...

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Calcidius

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God knows all things. . . . The things he knows are partly divine and immortal, partly perishable and temporal. . . . His knowledge of uncertain things . . . cannot be different from their nature. . ....

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Psalm 8 | God's Majesty

Author

Scott B. Bullock

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Psalm 8:, Psalm 144:3, Job 7:17, Hebrews 2:6-10, Matthew 21:16, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29

Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Background Structure This Psalm of David is unique. “It is the only hymn in the Old Testament composed completely as a direct address to God.” [1] It e...

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Author

Abraham Kuyper

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The "book of nature" must always be read in light of God's special revelation, the Bible.

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Author

Esau McCaulley

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Scripture

Revelation 7:9-10, Colossians 3:11, Psalm 117:1-2, Revelation 14:6

God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united b...

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Psalm 51 | Awareness of Sin

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Historical Clue The superscript of Psalm 51 gives us a historical clue about the composition of this Psalm, “A Psalm of David. When Nathan the prophe...

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When Henri Nouwen Couldn’t Feel God’s Love

Author

Bill Gaultiere

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Spiritual Warfare

The warmth of God’s presence can be elusive. In his secret journal, Henri Nouwen is vulnerable about a dark season in which he couldn’t feel God’s love. He’d helped millions of other people around ...

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Speaking And Acting

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Timothy Keller

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We humans may say, “Let there be light in this room,” but then we have to flick a switch or light a candle. Our words need deeds to back them up and can fail to achieve their purposes. God’s words, ho...

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Spiritual Formation: Essential to Human Existence

Author

M. Robert Mulholland Jr. and Ruth Haley Barton

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Scripture

2 Corinthians 3:18, Galatians 2:20, Colossians 1:28, Philippians 2:12-13, 2 Corinthians 4:16, 1 Timothy 64:7-8, Colossians 3:10-11

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

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Author

Richard J. Foster

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The Kingdom of God

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Ephesians 2:17-18, Revelation 22:17, Acts 10:34-35, John 14:6, Galatians 3:28

It is not that God’s kingdom of love did not exist before Jesus, or that it had been postponed somehow. No. But before the incarnation its availability had, in the nature of things, been restricted an...

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Author

Michael Fishbane

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There is no mere world or matters of fact for covenant theology; there is always the wonder and duty to the concrete moment at hand, where God’s illimitable gift of life is given into our hands – to h...

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Where is God? Hanging From the Gallows

Author

Jonathan Cornell

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Scripture

Matthew 27:46, Hebrews 4:15, 1 Peter 3:18, John 19:30, 1 Peter 4:13

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...

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Longing for Eden

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Caroline Cobb

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In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

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Why Get Out of Bed? Because of Love

Author

Alan Noble

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Scripture

1 Corinthians 13:, Ruth 1:16-18, 2 Corinthians 11:23-28, Luke 10:25-37, 1 Kings 19:1-18, Matthew 26:36-46, Isaiah 41:10

Adapted from Ch 4 of On Getting out of Bed. Why is Existence Good? Living for the sake of living—doing things so that you can continue to efficiently do things—begs the question, Why live? To live...

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Emotions are Divine: Why Pastors Need Biblical Permission to Feel

Author

David Lamb

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Scripture

John 11:35, Psalm 5:5, Psalm 6:1, Psalm 78:58, Psalm 78:40, Psalm 18:19, Psalm 25:6, Psalm 5:7, Exodus 20:5, Exodus 22:23, Isaiah 15:5, Luke 15:null, Genesis 23:2, Genesis 42:24, 1 Samuel 1:10, 2 Samuel 1:11-12, 2 Kings 8:11-12, 2 Kings 22:18-20, Mark 14:72, John 20:11, Acts 20:37, Revelation 5:4

When the Professor Weeps: A Personal Story About ten years ago, I was teaching a course on the psalms for my seminary students in the midst of a personal health crisis. It wasn’t in my notes, but I ...

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Dependence on God

Author

John R. W. Stott

Keywords

Dependence on God

Scripture

Galatians 6:2

I turn to John Wyatt [cf. p. 103: professor of ethics and perinatology at University College Hospital in London] for an eloquent expression of the priority of dependence: “God’s design for our life is...

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An Outline of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life

Author

Richard J. Foster

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Martyrdom

The outline of Bonhoeffer’s story is well known. In 1927 he was a student earning a doctorate in theology from Berlin University at the age of twenty-one. In 1930 he was a debater crossing theological...

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